Yes, because odds are we’re looking at photos printed (onto paper) in the 1950’s or 1920’s, so the colour has faded for 60+ years. Unless it’s Life or National Geographic, high quality sharp colour reproduction was not a hallmark of mass media either.
Yeah, I do agree with you. I reverse image searched the image, and it’s all over the map as to how they are processed.
This page seems to have before and after digital restoration of the photographs. Here’s a link to the “original” of that image, but it’s going to be hard to judge, because there’s still a host of factors that effect the color from the digital scan to the output on the monitor.
No mention has been made in this thread of Autochromes, colour film from early in the last century until Kodak blew it away.
Note that they are posted on Kosenko’s blog, but are definitely not his photos.
He has included a caption for each that gives the photographer’s name. Many are the work of Alfred Palmer.
I noticed that as well. I wonder if this says anything about the sensitivity of the film. Shallow depth of field -> large aperture -> lots of light -> low ISO/sensitivity -> low film grain. I wonder what the “best” film of the time was if light wasn’t an issue.
Today, of course, you can get an equally sharp image at ISO 6400 and beyond. Then, it was probably on the order of ISO 64 or less (equivalent… they didn’t actually have an ISO rating back then).
Kodachrome of that era was anywhere from 8-16 ASA. So, yeah, pretty slow. Not sure what other color films were around at the time, but I suspect 25 ASA is probably as high they would go during WWII era. Remember, though, you can also push process film, so from, say, 12 ASA film you can eke out 50 ASA (+2 stops), possibly 100 ASA (+3 stops), with degradation to image quality and grain. That said, while I’ve push processed a lot of modern emulsions and used to do it routinely in the film days, I have no idea how these early films would react to push processing.
Kodachrome was at its core a conventional silver halide b/w film, and did cope with push and pull processing about as well as any other b/w film. I know that later the Kodak Labs would (for a price) do one stop push and pulls, and with special pleading push two.
The fact that Kodachome was a b/w film was what gave its unique properties - the dyes were added after the initial processing and coupled to the silver in a manner that gave the film its dye-fastness; in comparison to those where the dye was bleached out. Before the dyes were added it was apparently a perfectly acceptable b/w image.
Kodachrome was never fast - I was cheerfully shooting 64ASA stock until I made the switch to Fuji Velvia (along with many others - something which was the end of Kodachrome.)
I still find it hard to name film speeds in ISO - even though ISO took over the denotation in 1973.
The OP’s image has that certain lusciousness that only film gives. The depth of field is brutal - the end of the soldier’s spear is well out of focus. The shot appears to have been taken with a somewhat long lens (longer than a “normal” lens) - both the shallow depth of field and the perspective of the planes behind one another suggest this. I’m going to bet it was shot on a folding medium format or 4x5 camera similar to a Linhoff Technica - or equivalent of the time.
1963, huh?
Yeah, my assumption was this is 4x5, based on the look of the image, and a guess that it’s Kodachrome and Kodachrome only had 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and sheet film available at the time of the image in the OP, at least according to Wikipedia’s timeline.
I guessed Kodachrome should push fine, but I didn’t know if anything in the complicated developing process, especially the early versions of it they would be using just before WWII, would make it somewhat more problematic or something. E-6 I’ve pushed up to 2 stops with reasonable results.
The captions aren’t even all his. He literally copy-and-pasted at least a few of them from Shorpy (mentioned by name once, and do a text search for ‘click here’ to see… absolutely nothing, because he wasn’t smart enough to reproduce the actual link associated with those words). He mentions Shorpy in the intro, but he doesn’t give credit to them for the captions in addition to the images.
If you’re only comparing digital photos to Matthew Brady’s stuff, then I suppose the existence of sharp, detailed photos developed from film might come as a shock.
Also, these photo’s are real good examples of photo’s. I’m sure for each of those factory shots, looking at the lack of any motion in relation to the low-ISO of the film from back then, that each was staged/modeled. Nothing wrong with that at all. Then, each scene was probably shot 3-5 times at different exposure levels for bracketing. The exposure is very good as he knew how to use a flash and control ambient light looking at the shadows. This is something that is a bit lost today. Everyone just hopes the dynamic range and built-in HDR capabilities will take care of that all, it just is not the same.
Not really. In professional photography, balancing external light with ambient (as well as accounting for the color temperatures of your various light sources) is still a pretty important and basic skill. If you want to do any commercial or portrait photography, you have to know how to light it, unless you’ve built your style around an “ambient only” approach (which is fine, but still requires a very skilled knowledge of light and ability to read to make it work. After all, photography, at its very basic, is all about light.) And in editorial photography/photojournalism, where you typically don’t have the time or ability to set up lights, you still have to know how to balance flash with ambient. It’s a very basic skill, even if you’re only using your on-camera flash (hopefully bounced or at least diffused.)